When you create a collaborative space, it is important to involve your users in the construction of your design and services. At first, to facilitate a collaborative way, it is necessary to think about the layout of the place in order to facilitate meetings and exchanges between its members.

You need to watch out for final designs. The strength of a collaborative space lies in the place’s appropriation by the users. The co-design of spaces and services must be constantly reinvented to allow everyone to appropriate the space, to participate in its development.

Starting from the needs identified, design services and spaces involving users, in an iterative and collaborative way:

•  open / closed spaces / movable partitions (meeting rooms, classrooms, closed offices, phone rooms, coworking spaces)
•  areas with a dedicated function (working space, meeting rooms, skype etc.)
•  grey areas where everything can happen
•  communification of spaces (gardens, nurseries, libraries, makerspaces, etc.)
•  conviviality spaces (living room, kitchen, dining tables, cafeteria etc.)
•  hosting area / reception / information desk
•  internal wayfinding

As you’ve already done while building your community, you can refer to this co-creation guide to set the co-creation session up.

It’s now time to identify basic material services, as well as their suppliers. Try to identify more than one supplier for each item, in order to reduce risks related to lack of alternatives. A non exhaustive list of basic material services includes:

•  Furnitures (modular, flexible, sustainable): desk, chairs, cloakroom etc.
•  Electrical, heating and water system, wi-fi connection
•  Power stocks and other office utilities (locker, printer, projector etc.)
•  Training materials (paper, flip charts, pens, pencils, whiteboard/blackboards)
•  Good acoustics and sound system for presentations, talks, events etc.
•  Board showing the activities and events inside the space

You can start by sketching a rough prototype of services in order to collect feedback and improve the service value proposition. In this guide (pages 19-26), you can find some examples of rough prototypes you can build and test in this phase.
After testing, don’t forget to debrief: gather your team and analyze all the feedback you collected (page 27). Prototyping is an iterative process: you can prototype, test and collect feedback once, then you can improve your prototype and test it again. This tool can help you while prototyping and improving at different stages.

A flexible space can be a good idea to start a collaborative space. It is the best way to try an interior design and develop it with your users. By time, when each of your users will regularly use the space, it might be adapted to their evolving needs. So, if you choose to create a final design at the very beginning of your project, you can incur the risk of losing the capacity to change it in the future. To avoid this risk, try to adopt some flexible and tactical solutions for the interior design. Here some examples of flexible, modular and movable solutions designed within the Make Space project developed at the d.school faculty (Stanford University): Hiding places, Foam cubes, T-walls, Z-Rack.